Down In the Valley

My oh my has it been a busy two weeks, friends!

First, I left Nashville a couple weeks ago and headed for Montreat to lead a small group during the second week of this summer's youth conferences. Just like college conference back in January, this was my first youth conference at Montreat. Not on purpose really...we were just always busy when my church's youth group went. But, anyway. It was such a wonderful experience. I spent 3 hours a day leading a small group of 26 high school youth. Some discussion of keynotes and such, some just hanging out and having fun, some eating Dunkaroos (thanks, Black Mountain Dollar General). And as it turns out spending a couple summers as a camp counselor is excellent preparation for small group leading. Seriously though, I met so many wonderful/enthusiastic/inspiring youth, and on top of that met some awesome fellow small group leaders, made some YAV connections, spent some time with friends from Davidson, and got my fill of energizers (not that there's such a thing as too many of those...). And I mean, I tell ya. These conferences I keep going to keep directly applying to my life. Wondering Wanders? Searching For the Signal? Sheesh, Montreat.

From there I headed down the road to camp. Camp was...so so wonderful. But weird. Wonderful to see many of my close friends that are still on staff there, but weird to not be on staff with them. I was one of the first aid folks for the week, so I didn't get to do a ton of camp-y stuff, but I did have a thoroughly entertaining sea weed (or...lake weed?) battle with some 8 year olds in canoes on Lake Refuge. And I learned a new blessing. If you're interested in blessing your food a la Sponge Bob Squarepants, you just let me know. It really was wonderful though. Lovely to see the people I already knew and fun to meet some new ones. Hard to leave yet again, but I've got some more thoughts on that coming later.

Annnd approximately 7 hours after I got home to Davidson from camp, Mom and I were on our way to Ohio, from whence we'll be heading to Michigan tomorrow. I was telling my mom in the car ride up here that I feel like a lot of great/difficult/meaningful things have happened in the last two weeks, but I'm not quite sure I've had the time to process it all. So, we'll see what ends up on this here blog in the coming weeks. There's the last two weeks, and then the fact that when I get back to Tennessee in a week I'll have just one more month left in Nashville. After that, a week and a half in Davidson and it's off to New Orleans! I s'pose one day maybe I'll be in one place for a while...

Love,
Allison.